Horizon brightened acceleration radiation entropy in causal diamond geometry: A near-horizon perspective

TL;DR

This paper extends the horizon brightened acceleration radiation framework to causal diamond spacetimes, showing that causal horizons act as thermal reservoirs with entropy production governed by conformal symmetry, independent of black holes.

Contribution

It generalizes the HBAR framework to causal diamonds and demonstrates the thermal nature of radiation and entropy flux in this setting, emphasizing the role of causal horizons.

Findings

Radiation spectrum is thermal with temperature T_D = 1/( )

Von Neumann entropy flux matches radiation entropy production

Causal horizons act as topological thermal reservoirs

Abstract

In this article, we extend the horizon brightened acceleration radiation (HBAR) framework, originally introduced by Marlan Scully et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, 8131 (2018), to the causal diamond (CD) spacetime. We study a cloud of two-level atoms, injected at random times in the asymptotic past of the CD, freely falling toward its causal horizon and emitting scalar radiation via a weak dipole coupling to a quantum field. In the near-horizon region, an emergent conformal symmetry-captured by conformal quantum mechanics (CQM)-governs the field dynamics and allows analytic control of the emission process. We find that the radiation spectrum is thermal, with temperature $T_D = 1/(\pi\alpha)$, and that the associated von Neumann entropy flux reproduces the entropy production of the radiation field. These results demonstrate that the causal horizons of the CD spacetime effectively act as a topological thermal reservoir, with thermal properties arising entirely from the global causal structure rather than from underlying microscopic degrees of freedom, highlighting that the validity of the HBAR framework is fundamentally tied to the existence of causal horizons, independent of the presence of a black hole.